Why are you part of a software community?

I’m thinking about posting a poll in a couple of days about software communities and I’m looking for some input on some of the responses. I have my set of possible responses, but I’d like some input before posting the poll. So, if you have some ideas, please post them in the comments.

The question is

Why are you part of a software community? or How do you participate in a software community?

Notice that I didn’t necessarily limit this to “open source”. Clearly that’s a big part of it. But there are a good number of robust communities that are not based around open source. Adobe, Microsoft, IBM all have massive communities. I know that for those of us in the open source realm that’s a little hard to understand (one of the reasons why I’m doing this), but it’s true. Some of the ideas I’ve had so far…

One thought on “Why are you part of a software community?”

Probably too late to be included, but I’m part because I want to make sure new developers are getting correct information and that experienced developers have a place to learn new things and to improve.